Post-Event Summary

Hope you enjoyed HUB10 "Design and visualization: making your mark in science". This was easily the HUB with the largest number of participants so far - haven't worked through the "on the night sign-up" sheet, but looks like 80 or so of us there - and we felt the meeting did a good job at achieving it's key aim i.e. promoting networking and interactions within and between the local HD scientific, and the international VizBi communities.

Yeah, we're biased, but will anyway say how much we enjoyed the way the three talks, from the three different designers (Francis Rowland, UX; Tom Grace, typography, Sandra Krahl, graphical) complemented each other, and did great jobs of making their points clearly and entertainingly. A real pleasure to hear from people with such different backgrounds from bioinformaticians, in this context. One of the things that's great about HUB is how we have a community of people interested in bioinformatics, but many of whom are not themselves bioinformaticians (editors, designers, journalists, event organisers, marketing experts), we learn a lot from these people, and I think it's mutual.

And the three flash talkers did a great job of keeping to their tough schedule, and being engaging and informative, just like you want from a flash talk. Really felt they added to the evening.

At VizBi there are quite a few people trying out sketchnoting, if you've done some, please do share them with us by mailing them to hub-hub@gmx.net, would be fun for the speakers to see them.

Thanks, all of you, for making it a great evening.

Do get in touch if you'd like to get more involved in making the meetings happen; even just volunteering to be someone in a lab/institute/organisation/company who goes to people there who you know could be interested in joining the meetings, and encouraging them to come along, would be great.

And if you were from out of town, and are interested in setting up something similar back home, just get in touch if you'd like to hear about our experiences starting things with HUB here.

If you've comments on the event, please feel free to edit the page and add them below. Great to hear ideas for new things we could try, improvements, please remember that we're much more likely to want to do something about those ideas if they're made respectfully and kindly. A current favourite (paraphrased) quote is (of uncertain attribution, it seems) "In academia we're all smart. Distinguish yourself by being kind"

Programme

Introduction to the meeting: 5 min

What is HUB?

Logistics for this meeting

What is HUB10 about?

Ice breaking exercise: 15 min

"Pictionary"-like exercise - each write down a (short) description of what you do (e.g. "Next Generation Sequencing of liver cancer genomes"), and then, without talking or writing any words, try to get the others in your group to guess this using sketching

each person could say what they like about their sketchnote, what they don't like, and what they learned by doing it

After 10 minutes, we'll ask if you've questions, then Francis can answer some

Flash Talks on visualization in biology/bioinformatics: 3 * 3 min

Heba Sailem

Bill Longabaugh

Manuela Beck

Group activities, designing, or analysing design together, of your own bioinformatics tools, scientific figures, or scientific posters, etc. BRING ALONG ANY EXAMPLES YOU'D LIKE TO WORK ON IN THIS SESSION and/or add them to our page of figures to be improved: 45 min

Show of hands, just before we begin, for how many people brought figures to work on

Put each person who brought a figure on their own table, separate from the others, together with flip-chart paper for sketching

If there aren't enough, we each bring examples ourselves, and take these to a table to lead a group

See if the figure is self-explanatory - figure's creator asks the other people in their group to explain the figure, to see if it's understandable without needing the explanation of it's creator

Figure creator gives info on

context/background needed for understanding the figure

main message(s) the figure aims to communicate

Discuss together, using sketches, ways the main messages of the article could be made more obvious, the figure could be improved

In the final 10 minutes, they should take turns with other groups (i.e. in "pairs" or if needed, triplets, of groups) showing the initial figure, and the sketches for changes to it - to do this they could:

try and explain the main message of the figure they didn't work on without input

if needed, group making figure gives necessary context etc. to explain aim of the figure

describe differences between initial and sketch figure, of the figure made by the other group, and guess why they might have been made

hear back from group who worked on the figure, to see whether they spotted the main changes and got the

discuss all together if there was anything they particularly learnt during the exercise/the whole meeting, and then at the end we share these together in the whole group

Wrap up: 10 min

Off to the pub

Participants

Please add yourself to the list of participants by editing the list below. You need an account on this wiki to be able to edit the page - if you don't have one, start by signing up for one. Once your account has been confirmed by one of the organisers, you can log in and edit this page by clicking on the 'edit' link at the top of the page.

Flash Talk Proposals

Great - three people want to present something, and we have three slots :) Please don't add more suggestions, as we're going with those from Heba, Bill, and Manuela

1. PhenoPlot: a glyph based visualization tool for high dimensional cellular imaging data

Heba Sailem, Institute of Cancer Research, London, UK

Cellular imaging plays an important role in biological discoveries. High content analysis of cellular images produce large multivariate data that describes complex phenotypes. The main methods that are used to visualize high content data are heat maps or coordinate-based graphs. However, these methods are limited to three-dimensional representations, or difficult to relate to cellular phenotypes, such as cell shape. Thus methods that represent high-dimensional cellular phenotype data in an intuitive way are still lacking. Here we design and develop a novel visualization method; PhenoPlot that simulates various aspects of cellular structures to represent imaging data in a concise and a quantitative way. PhenoPlot is available as a Matlab toolbox and allows plotting up to 22 variables using cell-like glyphs with combination of color based elements and proposes a novel visualization concept; Proportional Filling. Furthermore, PhenoPlot representation is independent of XY coordinates, which makes it a flexible tool to visualize imaging data. We illustrate the power of PhenoPlot in gaining insight into the morphological heterogeneity of 19 breast cancer cell lines.

2. BioFabric

Bill Longabaugh, Institute for Systems Biology, Seattle USA

A one-minute demo video showing how BioFabric displays a network where nodes are depicted as horizontal lines, not as points!

3. Infographics – How Infographics can help to get your scientific message across

Manuela Beck, EMBL, Heidelberg

Task List

A list of tasks that need to be done on or before the meeting day. Just sign your name to say that you'll do a task, and the same again when the task is done. Please note that this doesn't mean you have to do the task on your own, just that you'll make sure that it's done.